Seeing Icebergs and Inuit as Elemental Nature: An American Transcendentalist on and off the Coast of Labrador, 1864
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1865 a series of Atlantic Monthly articles written by the Transcendentalist minister David Atwood Wasson described the voyage to Labrador organized by American landscape painter William Bradford. Bradford was inspired by the success of fellow Hudson River school artist Frederic Edwin Church’s monumental painting, The Icebergs (1861), and Wasson’s role was to generate publicity for what would be Bradford’s own “great picture,” Sealers Crushed by Icebergs. Wasson produced many colourful descriptions of the icebergs encountered on the voyage, but he also depicted the Labrador shorescape as the planet earth at the dawn of time and the Inuit of Hopedale as unevolved, pre-adamic man. This article suggests that Wasson’s racism and rejection of the benign, mystical Nature of first-generation Transcendentalists Thoreau and Emerson reflects the rise of evolutionary theory and the cultural impact of the American Civil War. Abstract: En 1865, l’Atlantic Monthly décrivait, dans une série d’articles parus sous la plume du ministre transcendentaliste David Atwood Wasson, le voyage au Labrador organisé par William Bradford, un peintre de paysages américain. Ce dernier était inspiré par le succès de The Icebergs (1861), peinture monumentale d’un confrère de l’école de l’Hudson, l’artiste Frederic Edwin Church, et Wasson avait pour rôle de susciter de la publicité autour de ce qui allait être la propre « grande œuvre picturale » de Bradford, Sealers Crushed by Icebergs. Wasson a produit de nombreuses descriptions pittoresques des icebergs rencontrés en cours de route, mais il a aussi dépeint le paysage côtier du Labrador comme s’il s’agissait de la Terre au début des temps et l’Inuit de Hopedale comme s’il était une race non évolué, antérieur à Adam. Le présent article laisse entendre que le racisme de Wasson et son rejet de la Nature mystique et bénigne des transcendantalistes de la première génération, Thoreau et Emerson, reflètent la montée de la théorie de l’évolution et l’impact culturel de la Guerre civile américaine.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".